Contributors to our current issue are:
Carol Barnett is a Tigard artist. Since retiring in 1997 from a career in management and information systems at Oregon Health Sciences University, she has pursued a career as a visual artist, thus fulfilling a life long goal. She now teaches painting and has her work in private and public collections and has received awards for her work, including having a piece accepted for the permanent collection at the University of Oregon. She has been a member of the Watercolor Society of Oregon for ten years, a juried membership.
C. L. Bledsoe has published plays in Opium, Arkansas Literary Forum, and previously in Oregon Literary Review. Ten-minute plays have been performed at the University of Arkansas, No Shame Theater in Roanoke, Virginia, and as a podcast through the 2nd Hand Magazine. Bledsoe is an editor for Ghoti Magazine (http://www.ghotimag.com) and author of two poetry collections, Anthem, and _____(want/need).
Brian Bloss is an artist from Southern California. He graduated from CalArts from the Experimental Animation program. He enjoys long wandering walks through hills and uncharted wilderness. His turn-ons include rhythmic patterns of flashing colours as well as cacophonies of dreams. His film "Without In Of" received international play, which featured progressive light painting techniques. Brian's artistic career peaked in Kindergarden when he sold his first drawing for a penny.
Jody Bolz is the author of A Lesson in Narrative Time (Gihon Books, 2004). Her poems have appeared in The American Scholar, Indiana Review, Ploughshares, Southern Poetry Review and many other journals. She edits Poet Lore, America's oldest poetry magazine, founded in 1889.
Iain Bonner is a filmmaker/writer who lives in Melbourne, Australia. He's films have screened in New York, Chicago, India and Melbourne. With his producer he's just set up a production company called Bumpy Egg Productions, www.youtube.com/bumpyeggproductions.
Wendy Bougeoes is the 2008 Academy of American Poets award winner at Portland State University.
J. Boyer teaches in the Creative Writing Program at Artizon State University. His mos recent book, Love in the Time of Paris Hilton and Other Stories will be published next summer and include "What Passes For Love."
Justine Cooper is a New York artist.
Daniel Coshnear, dan@coshnear.org, lives in Guerneville, California with his wife and two children. He works at a group home for men and women with mental illnesses and substance issues. Coshnear teaches writing at a variety of Bay area extension programs and is author of Jobs & Other Preoccupations (Helicon Nine 2000), winner of the Willa Cather Fiction Award. His work has also been published in Big Ugly Review, among other journals.
Chris Cottrell is in th MA Creative Writing Program at Portland State University.
Amelia Craigen rolled off the line in Eastern Oregon. Book-learned in Seattle and Chicago, Amelia has been making art and paying rent in NYC for the past 12 years. She now resides in Portland, OR. Her animations are at http://www.ameliac.com/sweeney/index.html.
Melinda Crouchley is an English major/Writing minor at Portland State University. She has written two feature length screenplays, and a 30 minute short, "Villanelle," which is currently in production. Her work has been published in the Seattle Literary Review, and several college literary magazines/newspapers.
Lorna Crozier has authored 14 books of poetry, including The Garden Going on Without Us, Angels of Flesh, Angels of Silence, Inventing the Hawk, winner of the 1992 Governor-General’s Award, Everything Arrives at the Light, Apocrypha of Light, What the Living Won’t Let Go, and most recently Whetstone.
Phil Costa Cummins has worked in photography and as a motion picture
lab technician in New York City. Now residing in Southeastern New York.
An advocate of the "lyrical" approach to film as associated with works of the 1960's. Films awarded and exhibited at Ann Arbor Film Festival, Athens International Film Festival, The Collective For Living Cinema, No-Nothing Cinema, San Francisco Art Institute.
Tony Curtis is professor of poetry at the University of Glamorgan, where he also directs an MPhil in writing. He has published 26 books, including nine poetry collections.
Alice Derry teaches at Peninsula College in Port Angeles Washington. She has co-directed the Foothills Writers Series since 1980.
Nikki Dilbeck grew up in northern California in the 50’s and 60’s. Her summers were spent at Lake Tahoe, wandering dusty trails, floating in the clear blue lake, and all the while developing a love for open country and the intricacies of nature. An Oregonian for the last 30 years and still intrigued by nature, she wanders the back roads of Oregon and the western US whenever she can.
Barbara Drake is the author of the popular college textbook, Writing Poetry. Her other works include a collection of personal essays, Peace at Heart, An Oregon Country Life, and several books of poetry including Small Favors and What We Say to Strangers. Her newest book, Driving 100, is forthcoming from Fairweather Press. Drake recently retired from teaching literature and creative writing at Linfield College. She lives with her husband on a small farm in Yamhill County where they raise sheep and wine grapes and enjoy introducing their grandchildren, city-dwellers all, to the country life.
Andi Enns is a teenager. She is a member of the Young Playwright’s Roundtable of Kansas City at The Coterie Theatre. She has been professionally produced and her short plays have been integrated into several drama class curriculums in the Kansas City area. Her plays are available for amateur and professional production. Contact her at andi.enns@yahoo.com.
Oscar Fernández is Assistant Professor of Spanish & Comparative
Literature at Portland State University, Portland, Oregon. He
specializes in inter-American studies, literary theory, and the
intersection of culture, sexuality, and disease in literature. He is
a holder of a Woodrow Wilson Foundation Practicum Grant and a Folger
Institute Faculty Weekend Grant from the Folger Shakespeare Library.
Emily Kendal Frey received her MFA from Emerson College, where she was poetry editor of
REDIVIDER. Her teachers are Peter Jay Shippy, John Skoyles, and Bill Knott.
Recent work is forthcoming from New York Quarterly, W*ord For/Word, La
Petite Zine, Spinning Jenny, Bat City Review, horse less press, Portland
Review, Octopus and Knock.
The late Vi Gale's first book, "Several Houses," was published in 1959 and was chosen one of the 100 best books in Oregon history from 1800-2000 by the Oregon Cultural Heritage Commission. Gale's other books include "Love Always," "Nineteen Ing Poems," "Clearwater" and "Odd Flowers & Short-Eared Owls."
Tess Gallagher, a poet, essayist, novelist, and playwright, won the 1976 Elliston Book Award for "best book of poetry published by a small press". Her honors include a fellowship from the Guggenheim Foundation, two National Endowment of the Arts Awards, and the Maxine Cushing Gray Foundation Award.
Cristina Garcia was born in Havana, Cuba, and grew up in New York City. She is the author of Dreaming in Cuban, The Aguero Sisters and Monkey Hunting. She lives in Santa Monica.
Gary Gildner is the author of twenty books of poetry, ficton and memoir. His latest poetry collection is
Cleaning A Rainbow. He lives in Idaho's Clearwater Mountains.
Darryl Grant, a jazz musician and composer, teaches at Portland State University.
Sam Green was named Washington State Poet Laureate by Gov. Chris Gregoire in December of 2007. He is the author of 10 poetry collections, including his soon-to-be released book The Grace of Necessity (Carnegie Mellon University Press, 2008). His work has appeared in numerous publications. For more than 30 years, he has served as editor of a small press focusing on the work of Washington poets.
Amy R. Handler is a Boston-based poet, speculative fiction writer, photographer and filmmaker. Born in Boston and raised in a small country town in south - western MA, she received a BA in English Literature and an MS in Sociology from Boston University. She later earned a photography degree at the New England School of Photography and an MFA in Visual Arts from the Art Institute of Boston at Lesley University.
Handler's writing and films concern ordinary people living their mundane lives. However, in so doing, something extraordinary occurs. Her work tends to be speculative, examining such things as time, fate, and coincidence. She also makes us notice that we all have the capacity for good and evil, often presenting at the same moment.
Daniel Harrington spent the last thirteen years following seasonal jobs in wildlife biology. He has turned to writing, and will finish a degree in English/writing at
Eastern Oregon University in the spring of 2008. This is his first published piece of creative non-fiction.
Isabelle Haskins is finishing her MFA at Oregon State University and is at work at a collection of short stories titled "Kiddie Pool."
Jane Hirshfield is the author of Nine Gates: Entering the Mind of Poetry (1997) and has also edited and translated The Ink Dark Moon: Poems by Ono no Komachi and Izumi Shikibu, Women of the Ancient Court of Japan (1990) with Mariko Aratani and Women in Praise of the Sacred: Forty-Three Centuries of Spiritual Poetry by Women (1994).
Garrett Hongo is the author of two books of poetry: The River of Heaven (1988), which was the Lamont Poetry Selection of The Academy of American Poets and a finalist for the Pulitzer Prize, and Yellow Light (1982). His most recent book is Volcano: A Memoir of Hawai'i (Alfred A. Knopf, 1995).
Margaret Hood has a card and print line that is represented in over 35 stores in Oregon. Cards are sold by Coast Range Card Co. and are in stores from Astoria to Newport and throughout the Willamette Valley. All cards and prints are from original photographs that are then digitally enhanced with vivid color and various techniques.
Two of Hood's photographs are in Ky Weed Jennings book, "A Window to the Sea" due out June 2008. She is in the process of compiling a "coffee table" book of the Willamette Valley wine industry. Her web site is www.margarethood.com
Robert Jacoby is currently pursuing happiness in Maryland. "Cape John" is a chapter from his unpublished nonfiction book,Idiot's Despair, the memoir of a 61-year-old, life-long merchant marine re-counting forty years of politically incorrect exploits around the world. Jacoby has also completed a novel, There are Reasons Noah Packed No Clothes, and is at work on a second novel, Dusk and Ember.
Harold Johnson is a poet,painter and retired high school teacher in Portland,Oregon.
Gerard Jones founded and maintains the infamous website EVERYONE WHO'S ANYONE IN ADULT TRADE PUBLISHING, NEWSPAPERS, MAGAZINES, BROADCASTING AND TINSELTOWN, TOO: A Writer's Guide to The All-Pervasive Propaganda Network (Last Edition, 2008).
Corrina Karch is a student at Portland State University.
Kurtis Lamkin is a multi-faceted talent - besides being a
poet, he is also a musician who plays a 21-stringed West African harp/lute
instrument called the 'kora', has composed the lyrics and music for a dance
concert ('Psychic Lover') and had an animated poem "The Foxes Manifesto,"
based upon the 1976 Soweto Rebellion that was aired for two years on PBS.
Richard Larson is a photographer and horse owner. His website, www.ninehorsesstudio.com reveals his passion for photographing horses in all environments. He lives and works in Portland, OR.
Michael Malan is an editor at Cloudbank Books in Corvallis, Oregon.
His poems have appeared in Epoch, Hawaii Review,
Midwest Quarterly, Wisconsin Review, and elsewhere.
He was co-editor of Millennial Spring: Eight New Oregon
Poets (Blue Heron, 2000).
Kate Mann is a former high-school teacher. She had an awakening in 2005 that led her to dedicate herself to music full time. She traded in her car for a van, overhauled her mother’s classic 1963 Gibson steel–string acoustic, and started playing coffeehouses, dive bars, and farmers’ markets. Her unique brand of moody Americana has been cultivating a loyal local fan base, and she is continuing the trend regionally with performances throughout the Pacific Northwest. She has also been getting attention in Belgium and Holland, where her first album received airplay and positive reviews.
Sandra McPherson's poetry collections include, A Visit to Civilization (Wesleyan University Press, 2002), The Edge Effect (1996), The Spaces Between Birds (1996), The God of Indeterminancy (1993), and The Year of Our Birth (1978), which was nominated for the National Book Award. She has also published nine chapbooks. Her honors include two grants from the Ingram Merrill Foundation, three National Endowment of the Arts fellowships, a Guggenheim Foundation Fellowship, and an award in literature from the American Academy and Institute of Arts and Letters.
Sharmila Mukherjee lives in Brooklyn. She teaches at New York University and spends the rest of her time reading, writing and loving a most amazing partner. She was born and raised in the 'city of joy' Calcutta, India. The landscape of her fiction is Bengal and she writes about Bengalis struggling to retain their identities in an increasingly globalizing India. She has stories published in South Asian Review amongst other literary journals. Currently she is working on an epistolary novel tentatively entitled The Imperial Mother.
Christopher Mulrooney has written criticism in Blue Fifth Review, Elimae,
The Film Journal and Small Press Review.
Jean Nordhaus' fourth volume of poetry, Innocence, won the Charles B.
Wheeler Prize and was published by Ohio State University Press in November,
2006. She has published work in American Poetry Review, the New Republic,
Poetry, Best American Poetry 2000, and teaches poetry workshops at the
Writer's Center in Bethesda, Maryland. A poem from Innocence appears in 2007
Pushcart Prize: Best of the Small Presses.
Frederick M. Nunn is a Professor Emeritus of History and International Studies, Portland State University; and Visiting Professor of History and Latin American Studies, University of Arizona.
William O'Daly is a poet, novelist, essayist, and translator of six volumes of the late and posthumous poetry of Nobel laureate, Pablo Neruda for Copper Canyon Press. He is also one of the original co-founders of the press, which grew directly from his work with Sam Hamill at Spectrum magazine.
Celeste O'Dell has published several short stories, including "The Bridegroom," which was awarded the Balch fiction prize for the best story published in The Virginia Quarterly Review in 1997. Her story, "Late in the Holocene," just appeared in you are here, a publication of the University of Arizona. Her short story collection, A Revised History of Elkhorn, was recently first runner-up in the Sol Books short fiction competition.
Linda Pastan is the author of Queen of a Rainy Country (W. W. Norton, 2006); The Last Uncle (2002); Carnival Evening: New and Selected Poems 1968-1998 (1998), which was nominated for the National Book Award; and numerous other books.
Jude Patrong lives in Trinidad. He is the author of El Jardin de Valencia and Poemas of the Caribbean Sun.
Robert Peake studied poetry at U.C. Berkeley and is currently in the Master of Fine Arts program at Pacific University in Oregon. He most recently received an honorable mention in The Atlantic Monthly Student Writing Competition. His poems have appeared in Askew, California Quarterly, Cider Press Review, North American Review, and two anthologies of Southern California poetry. He has been a featured reader at venues throughout Southern California. Robert writes about poetry at .
Aaren Yeatts Perry reads his poems on the CD, "Mercury Calling."
Poets from NFAA: Sasha Joy Debevec-McKenny is a graduate of Greater Hartford Academy of the Arts,Windsor,Connecticut. She will be attending Beloit College in the fall. Jenna Devine is a graduate of the Pingry School, Lebanon, NJ. She is a 2008 Presidential Scholar in the Arts and will be attending Princeton University in the fall. Janan Scott is a graduate of Towson High School in Baltimore , Maryland. Cristina Castro is an an aspiring playwright from Winston Churchill High School, Minneapolis, Minnesota.
Frederick Scott Pool is a writer masquerading as the section manager of the process engineering etch department at TriQuint Semiconductor. He received a B.S. in Physics and B.S. in Mathematics from Oregon State University in 1982 and a Ph.D. in Condensed Matter Physics in 1988 from Purdue University. After graduation Frederick worked as a research staff member at the Jet Propulsion Laboratory of NASA in Pasadena California. In 1998 he entered the semiconductor industry, where he has since been employed. Frederick joined TriQuint Semiconductor in 2000, which allowed a return to his native Oregon. He has published over thirty technical papers. The creative lust for poetry, fiction and screenwriting has captivated his attention beyond any technological or scientific pursuit.
Lori Rice recently graduated from Portland State University. In the sixth grade she was published in the 1995 edition of A Celebration of Oregon's Young Poets. Today she focuses on screenwriting.
Pattiann Rogers has published numerous books of poetry, including Generations (Penguin, 2004), and Song of the World Becoming: New and Collected Poems, 1981-2001 (2001). She has been the recipient of two NEA grants, a Guggenheim Fellowship, and a Lannan Poetry Fellowship. Her poems have won several prizes, including the Tietjens Prize and the Hokin Prize from Poetry.
Jeff Rollins has a theatre degree from the University of Maryland. He's had a 40-year career in radio and currently does a daily music show playing Sinatra, Tony Bennett, Streisand, etc. on the Dial Global Radio Networks Adult Standards heard on 150 Radio stations nationally. And he has had an active theatrical career wherever he has done radio. Jeff has worked with some wonderfully talented people from Maryland to San Francisco to Los Angeles; even founding a couple of theatres along the way in Salisbury, Maryland and Palo Alto, California. "These Are the Days of Miracle and Wonder," a one man show currently in progress, attempts to make sense of an incongruous life that has sought balance. Jeff is also collaborating on a show which he and his co-authors hope to take to New York in the next year.
Dirgham H. Sbait is a Professor of Arabic/Semitic languages, Literatures, & Folklore at Portland State University.
Mark Schafer received a Translation Fellowship from the National Endowment for the Arts. His manuscript Before Saying Any of the Great Words: Selected Poetry of David Huerta will be available in November from Copper Canyon Press.
Andrew Scott lives and writes in Indianapolis. His stories, author interviews, and book reviews have appeared, or will appear, in Glimmer Train, Mid-American Review, The Writer's Chronicle, The Cincinnati Review, and Esquire. His story chapbook, Modern Love, was released in 2006. He teaches at Ball State University and is finishing a novel. With the writer Victoria Barrett, he has started an online fiction quarterly, Freight Stories (www.freightstories.com).
Anousha Sedighi is on the Foreign Languages and Literatures faculty at Portland State University.
Kala Sims is a senior at Jefferson High School in Portland, Oregon. She will be attending Benedict College in the fall, 2008.
Michael Southern is a painter, printmaker and teacher who has lived and worked in Portland, Oregon for the past ten years. He received his primary arts education in intaglio printing. He made his first etching in 1988 at Amherst College in Massachusetts and obtained his MFA in printmaking from the University of Georgia in Athens in 1995.
Mike Trent was born and raised in Midland,
Michigan. Upon high
school graduation, he moved to Vancouver, British
Columbia to spend two
years studying animation at Vancouver Film School.
During the last six
months of his stay, he completed his short film, No
Quarter, and has
since pursued a career as a 3D character animator.
Heather Treseler is a Lilly Fellow and a doctoral candidate at the University of Notre Dame.
This year, she's teaching at Washington University while finishing a dissertation
on lyric iconography in post-war American poetry. Her work has appeared or is
forthcoming in 13th Moon, Timbuktu (U. K.), Sow's Ear Poetry Review, and Notre
Dame Review.
Robert Hodgson Van Wagoner's first novel, Dancing Naked (Signature Books, 1999), was awarded the Utah Center for the Book's Utah Book Award and the Utah Arts Council's Publication Prize. His short stories have appeared in literary periodicals and anthologies, including The Best of Writers at Work and In Our Lovely Deseret, and have been selected for various awards, including Carolina Quarterly's Charles B. Wood Award for Distinguished Writing, Shenandoah's Jeanne Charpiot Goodheart Award for Fiction, Sunstone's Brookie and D.K. Brown Memorial Fiction Award, and Weber Studies' Dr. O. Marvin Lewis Award for Best Fiction, 1994-1997. Van Wagoner recently completed his second novel, Cautionary Tales. He and his family live in Washington State.
David Wagoner is the author of numerous poetry collections, including Good Morning and Good Night (University of Illinois Press, 2005); The House of Song (2002); Traveling Light: Collected and New Poems (1999); and Walt Whitman Bathing (1996). Wagoner is also the author of ten novels, including The Escape Artist (1965), which was adapted into a movie by Francis Ford Coppola. He has received an American Academy of Arts and Letters award, the Sherwood Anderson Award, the Fels Prize, the Ruth Lilly Poetry Prize, the Eunice Tjetjens Memorial and English-Speaking Union prizes from Poetry magazine, and fellowships from the Ford Foundation, the Guggenheim Foundation, and the National Endowment for the Arts.
Paul Weidknecht is a writer and photographer living in Phillipsburg, New Jersey. His work has appeared or is forthcoming in Outdoor Life, Boston Literary Magazine, Fur-Fish-Game, and Snowy Egret. He's written a feature-length historical screenplay, A Storm In Season, about a former slave who became the first African-American war hero. When not writing, he can be found fly-fishing the mountain trout streams of New Jersey, Pennsylvania, and North Carolina, places where Bigfoot has been known to occasionally show up. He remains hopeful.
Robert Wrigley teaches and directs the MFA in Creative Writing at the University of Idaho.
Lev Yilmaz is the creator of the Comic/Animation
series "Tales Of Mere Existence". He has a series of comic books, http://www.ingredientx.com/